Blogs / Discoblog

The next time you think about making that cocktail a double, wait—it might already be one.

William Kerr, along with colleagues from the Alcohol Research Group at the Public Health Institute, took a scientific bar crawl—no, not the kind where you visit science-themed drinking establishments. The researchers visited 80 places in northern California, mostly bars and restaurants, to find out the alcohol content of their drinks—by analyzing them, not by partaking. Compared to the scientific standard of one drink—12 ounces of beer, 5 ounces of wine, or one and a half ounces of 80-proof liquor—the bars and restaurants were pretty generous with their liquor, giving out stronger booze than the researchers expected, and more of it.

(more…)

A good week for drinkers may have just gotten better.

First, Venezuelan scientists said they’d identified the chemicals that make beer spoil and were working on a way to keep them out of the bottle. Then researchers announced that a chemical found in red wine could help keep your heart young and strong. Now, Swedish scientists published a study declaring that drinkers were much less likely than non-drinkers to ever develop rheumatoid arthritis.

The researchers surveyed about 2,700 people—around 1,600 of whom had arthritis. When the scientists compared subjects to people of their own age, sex, and hometown, those who said they were “heavy drinkers” had developed arthritis about 50 less of the time than those who did not partake as frequently.

(more…)

As a former bench scientist who sips a beer on occasion, I was intrigued by an article that ran in The New York Times science section yesterday about the inverse relationship between a scientist’s success and the amount of beer he or she consumes. Dr. Tomás Grim, an ornithologist from Palacký University in the Czech Republic, surveyed the beer-consumption habits of 18 Czech scientists in 2002 and 34 in 2006 (some of whom were the same as those surveyed before), and found that the more beer a scientist drinks, the fewer papers she publishes, and the lower the quality of those papers. In short, less successful scientists drink beer. (more…)